Thursday, October 19

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

More beautiful weather.

My Sweetie finished caulking the windows.

I did assorted things; vacuumed, swept in the sunroom (mostly has cat litter box in there), did a load of laundry.

I got determined to clean off the area in the back. It is basically just a big, old slab of concrete, and with all the work on the house this summer it's gotten littered with bits of wood, bits of siding, pails, and just crap. Also, the leaves have built up on it.

I am sick of looking at that mess, as this is the door I use most of the time, and this mess is the thing that greets me every time I leave or enter our home.

I couldn't do much about it while the siding was in full swing, but since my husband is almost done, we CAN CLEAN IT UP NOW.

I swept up all the leaves, tossed a few things, and my husband picked up the plastic bits and such.

I also cut back a shrub that grows at the edge of this concrete slab. If it's properly cut back there's room to mow between it and the concrete. If it is overgrown, the branches extend to the slab, and the space between is a weedy mess.

So I cut it all back. Then I took all the leaves and branches over the the edge of the property where I dump all the stuff that will break down naturally over time.

Then we went to the park down the road to walk for a while. I insisted. This house sucks so much of our time that for the last few years since we moved it onto our property, all we do is work on it, or go to town to buy things for it, it seems.

It was nice to walk today, perfect weather, no bugs, no wind, just wonderful. Roxy had a good time too.

Then we watched more "Breaking Bad".

I learned a bit about the Royal Mews in London (a stable).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mews

It is still very much in use to train horses for state events. The horses are ridden and driven in traffic almost every day to get them used to cars and people and so on. Many of the state carriages are kept here, as well as many of the older limousines used in parades.

https://youtu.be/ggCUhh-ruNU?si=XboVdky3f1ya-4CP

During WWI, the mews was used as a hospital and often housed wounded soldiers. Several of the staff of the mews served as military veterinarians, or just to care for the horses. Some of the horses were sent to war as well.

https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/king-george-vs-war-museum/king-george-v-and-queen-mary

Comments

[ratunderpaper]

Well done on cleaning up that "broken window" by the side door!

Time for me to get rid of a similar one - a broken bird feeder, two pairs of boots that are not good enough for the Goodwill, a broken toddler toy from 20+ years ago, and a load of recycling. I don't think anyone sees it as a mess except me.

[gottawonder]

Yes. I couldn't really address it while the siding was still being done, but it had really gotten bad.

There are currently a few more areas like that near the house that have been just dumping grounds for the last couple of years with the excuse (from my husband) that it "needs to be there" because of work being done on the house.

I really hope to clear off another big mess beside the house in the next week or so, since if the siding is done, why is it still a dumping ground?

My husband literally doesn't seem to see these areas as eyesores, to him they're "work areas", but HONEST TO GOD it's supposed to be our YARD, you know, flower beds and a nice clean area to sit outside and eat supper, or just to be tidy. The entire property isn't a "work area".

[ratunderpaper]

Are his siblings like that?

I've noticed a common thread in retaining hooey, junk collecting and living in an unfinished state - within brothers of a certain family. Some are worse than others.

[gottawonder]

His siblings are both female, and don't seem to have the same context as they aren't doing any projects like ours.

His Father was always working on something, and did hang on to building materials a bit, but was limited due to space constraints of living in town. From anything that I saw, everything did get picked up and put away, and certainly did NOT lie around in the yard from one year to the next on the pretext of it "needing to be right there" for next year.

The absolute scope of our house project IS QUITE LARGE, and it is not unreasonable that it is a multi-year project, BUT, it's really dragging out.

My husband wants to do as much of it himself as possible to save money, and on some level he's not wrong there, but here we are, four full years after we began, and the two rooms on the main floor in the addition are still not done.

The yard is ALMOST back to where it was before we moved the house here. Just a ring of mess that hopefully can now be finally put away somewhere or tossed.

I don't know what the yard would have looked like without my constant vigilance, selling things that can be sold that we don't need to keep, taking things to the dump, giving away some materials, picking up all the bits and pieces as they fall to the ground from off cuts, putting things away as he moves on to the next part of the project and just abandons materials from the last stage.

That's the one that really drives me nuts, and he does it INSIDE the house too. He works on something, and never fully cleans up or puts away everything. When he did the tiling in the bathroom downstairs, he left the tile saw and tile off cuts just lying in the middle of the floor in the basement, and abandoned it because he was done that part. Weeks went by and I finally had to be the initiator to go down there and put it all away.

This is what he does outside too. Maybe he puts away the tools, but you can see all of the "stations" where he cut siding here, or lumber, or trim, and all the chunks just fall to the ground that he isn't using, and he left them there as he moved around to another side of the house. According to him, there was "no point in cleaning up because he wasn't done yet".

So, now we are walking around the house trying to pick it all up and put it away or toss it. Sigh.

[ratunderpaper]

A friend and her husband redid their kitchen a few years back, and he left the cast-off parts outside the kitchen door for weeks. Finally, she told him that she wasn't happy. He took it all away after that, without complaint. Nice, hm?

Not a world I recognise, but good for them.

[gottawonder]

Sometimes it works for us, but it's really something that you have to make a POINT of it. How long would it sit there otherwise? Do THEY not notice that it's a mess?

[ratunderpaper]

No, they do not, because they do not care.
Aesthetics are something that has to be drummed into an individual from an early age, I think. They can be appreciated long before they are actualised, but I have a suspicion that sloppiness or a sense of aesthetics is like religion - it's ingrained in youth.